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What do you need to know about Thermal Physics?

I love physics, but I used to think this one topic, thermal physics, was boring. I had to teach it twice before I understood it well enough to see how interesting it really is!

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What makes thermal physics interesting is that it provides a link between the macroscopic world of Newton’s laws and the invisible microscopic world of atoms and molecules.

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Thermal physics provided the vital clues that led to our discovery of the atom. It also provided the first hint of the quantum revolution to come, by introducing the concept of unpredictability and randomness into the field of physics.

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Brownian motion is random and unpredictable, even though we may imagine that it results from an uncountable number of simple Newtonian collisions.

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It would be up to Einstein to show that Brownian motion provides irrefutable evidence of the existence of atoms.

He did that in his “miracle year”, 1905, when he also published his theory of special relativity.

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Einstein came up with the world’s most famous equation,

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E = mc^2

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He proposed an explanation for the photoelectric effect, thereby launching the new field of quantum mechanics.

It’s remarkable that Einstein only won one Nobel, and he didn’t even win that one until 1921.

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